History & Philosophy of Science

For one and a half thousand years, European science lived within the Ptolemaic universe: the Earth stands motionless at the center, around it revolve the Moon, the Sun, five planets, and the sphere of stars. The system described the observed motions of celestial bodies with astonishing accuracy—u...

The Ptolemaic system was not simply “incorrect science.” It worked: it allowed for the prediction of eclipses, the motions of planets, and the creation of calendars. Its acceptance was rational—it explained observations. Its problem was not contradicting facts, but in its growing complexity and, ...

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), in "On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres" (1543), proposed the heliocentric model: at the center is the Sun, around it revolve the Earth and planets. The Earth is one of the planets, rotates on its axis (explaining the alternation of day and night) and revo...

It is important to understand: Copernicus’s model was no more accurate than the Ptolemaic one (he also used epicycles), and was not based on new observations. Its advantage was aesthetic and conceptual: it was simpler, more elegant, and explained the retrograde motion of planets without ad hoc ep...

Definitions

The problem of purpose

— if evolution is blind—there is no "purpose" in life in an objective sense. Man is not for something, he simply is the result of a process. This has caused and continues to cause powerful cultural resistance.

The problem of morality

— if we are the product of selection, our moral instincts are also a product of selection. This does not mean that morality is "unreal"—it explains where it came from (sociobiology, evolutionary ethics). But it leads to an acute question: how do we ...

Darwinism and society

— "social Darwinism"—the application of the principle "survival of the fittest" to society—was popular at the end of the 19th century and served to justify laissez-faire capitalism and colonialism. This is a crude misuse of the theory: natural selec...

Before Darwin, the prevailing view of living nature was fixism: species are immutable and were created in their present form. William Paley, in "Natural Theology" (1802), proposed the famous analogy: if you find a watch on a heath, you conclude that it had a maker. The complexity of living organi...

This was not just a religious position, but quite a rational scientific one: living organisms truly are astonishingly complex and well-adapted. Without an evolutionary explanation, the most reasonable answer is that something intelligent created them.

The first evolutionists (Lamarck) proposed a mechanism of inheritance of acquired characteristics: a giraffe stretches for leaves, its neck becomes longer, this is passed on to offspring. A beautiful idea, but incorrect—and without explanatory power for complex adaptation.

Charles Darwin, in "On the Origin of Species" (1859), proposed a mechanism explaining adaptation without a Creator. Three key observations and a conclusion:

Definitions

Wave-particle duality

— the electron is both a particle and a wave. In the double-slit experiment, the electron passes through both slits simultaneously (as a wave) — but is registered at one point (as a particle). Observation “selects” one outcome.

Quantum superposition

— prior to measurement, a particle is in a superposition of states. Schrödinger’s cat is both alive and dead at the same time, until the box is opened. This is not a metaphor — it is a literal consequence of quantum mechanics.

In 1905, twenty-six-year-old patent clerk Albert Einstein published four articles, each of which changed physics. The special theory of relativity was based on two postulates: the laws of nature are the same for all inertial reference frames; the speed of light in a vacuum is constant for all obs...

The consequences were revolutionary: time slows down for moving objects; length contracts; mass increases with speed; space and time are not absolute, but form a unified four-dimensional space-time. The famous $E=mc^2$ — energy and mass are equivalent, an enormous amount of energy is hidden in a ...

This contradicted Newtonian intuition: in Newton's theory, time is absolute (flows the same everywhere), space is absolute (does not change). Einstein showed: these intuitions are true for low velocities (which explains Newtonian mechanics as an approximation), but are violated at speeds comparab...

In 1915, Einstein completed the general theory of relativity — a theory of gravity. The key idea: gravity is not a force (as in Newton), but the curvature of space-time. Massive objects curve the surrounding space-time; other objects move along the curves of this space-time.

Definitions

Normal science

— most of the time, scientists work within a paradigm—a set of shared assumptions, methods, and exemplars for solving problems. The paradigm determines what questions to ask, what methods to use, what counts as a solution. Within normal science, sci...

Anomalies and Crisis

— observations accumulate that don't fit the paradigm. At first, they are ignored or explained ad hoc. When anomalies become too numerous—a crisis occurs.

Revolution

— the crisis is resolved by a change of paradigm—a "gestalt switch" after which the world appears differently. Supporters of different paradigms speak different languages and perceive the same experience differently. Paradigms are incommensurable—th...

What distinguishes science from non-science? Karl Popper, in "The Logic of Scientific Discovery" (1934), proposed the criterion of falsifiability: a theory is scientific if it is in principle refutable—if there exist (even hypothetical) observations that could disprove it.

Einsteinian physics: if starlight does not deflect near the Sun—the theory is false. This observation can be made—and was made (Eddington, 1919). Freud's theory of the unconscious: any behavior can be explained through psychoanalysis. There is no observation that could disprove it. This is not sc...

Popper proposed an asymmetry: a theory cannot be confirmed by a million examples—one counterexample refutes it. Science advances not through verification but through falsification: the creation of bold hypotheses and attempts to disprove them. Theories survive if no refutation has yet been found.

Thomas Kuhn, in "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (1962), challenged Popper's image of science as continuous falsificationism. The actual history of science looks different.

Definitions

Reproducibility crisis

— in the 2010s, psychology, medicine, and economics faced a crisis—many “classic” results failed to reproduce in independent studies. Systemic problems: the “publish or perish” pressure stimulates questionable practices (p-hacking, HARKing—hypothese...

Climate change

— scientific consensus (IPCC: >97% climatologists)—anthropogenic warming is real and dangerous. This is a scientific fact, not a political position. What political response—cutting emissions, nuclear energy, adaptation, carbon tax—these are politica...

Vaccines

— the anti-vaccination movement is based on a falsified study (Wakefield, 1998, retracted in 2010) and fueled by distrust of the medical establishment. Scientific consensus is unequivocal: vaccines are safe and effective. But when trust in instituti...

In the 17th–18th centuries, the “Republic of Scholars” (Res Publica Litteraria) emerged—a transnational intellectual community connected through correspondence, journals, and academies. The first scientific academies—the Royal Society of London (1660), the Paris Academy of Sciences (1666)—institu...

The norms of this republic were described by Robert Merton (1942): universalism (the truth does not depend on the personality of the scholar); communism (knowledge is public property, discoveries are published); disinterestedness (scientific activity is conducted for knowledge, not for personal g...

This is an ideal, from which real science often deviates: disputes over priority (Newton vs Leibniz—who invented calculus?), classified military research, commercialization of science (patents, corporate funding). But the ideal sets a normative horizon.

Big science of the 20th century (atomic project, space exploration, the human genome) required state funding. This created a close relationship between science and the state—and raised the question of scientific autonomy.

Definitions

Technological determinism

— technology develops according to its own logic and determines social development. “If it can be done—it will be done.” The rifle created warrior societies; the printing press created the Reformation; the internet created a new type of publicity.

Social constructivism

— technologies are not determined—they are the result of social choices, political decisions, economic interests. Why did the automobile, not the bicycle, become the dominant mode of transportation in the USA? This is due to political decisions abou...

Transhumanism

— technology should be used for radically enhancing human abilities—cognition, health, longevity, emotional states. Nick Bostrom: there is no moral meaning in “natural” limitation if it can be overcome.

Bioconservatism

— Leon Kass, Michael Sandel—transhumanist enhancements threaten the “gift of imperfection”, human dignity, concepts of merit and chance on which morality is built. If parents can “order” a child with a high IQ—the meaning of upbringing, love, accept...

On August 6, 1945, an atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima: about 80,000 people died instantly, tens of thousands more perished from radiation sickness. The Manhattan Project—the largest scientific and technological enterprise in history—created a weapon that changed the nature of war and the worl...

Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb”, after the Trinity test (1945), recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Later, he said that scientists had “known sin”—becoming accomplices in mass destruction.

This raised the question of the scientist’s responsibility: is a nuclear physicist responsible for the application of his discoveries? Arguments in favor: knowledge is created intentionally, scientists can foresee possible applications, their participation is irreplaceable—therefore, they have mo...

The Pugwash movement (1957)—nuclear scientists, including Einstein and Russell, who took on responsibility for publicly warning of the dangers of nuclear weapons. This is a precedent: scientists can and should participate in public discussion about the consequences of their discoveries.

David Chalmers (1995) distinguished between "easy" and the "hard" problems of consciousness. The "easy" ones: how the brain processes information, regulates attention, controls behavior—these are, in principle, solvable by neuroscience and cognitive science. The "hard" problem: why is there subje...

Thomas Nagel ("What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", 1974): a bat has the subjective experience of echolocation, which is fundamentally inaccessible to us. Physicalism (everything reduces to physical processes) does not explain this "what-it-is-likeness" (qualia).

Neuroscience seeks the neural correlates of consciousness—the minimal neural mechanisms sufficient for conscious experience. Candidates: global workspace (Dehaene); integrated information (Tononi, IIT); predictive processing (Friston, Clark).

But a neural correlate ≠ an explanation. Knowing which neurons are active during the perception of red does not mean explaining why red "looks red."

Standard evolutionary synthesis (1940s): random mutations + natural selection + Mendelian genetics. Extended synthesis (late 20th — early 21st century) adds: epigenetics (inheritance not encoded in DNA), niche construction (organisms change their environment, altering selection pressure), evolvab...

Evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology): regulator genes (Hox genes) control body plan. The same gene in a fly and a human — radically different result depending on the regulation.

Richard Dawkins (1976): memes — units of cultural transmission, analogous to genes. Ideas, songs, practices are replicated, mutate, compete. This is a controversial analogy, but it opened the field of cultural evolution.

The 1950s — the cognitive revolution against behaviorism (Skinner): psychology is a science of unobservable mental processes, not only of behavior. Chomsky, Miller, Neisser. The brain is a computer that processes information according to rules.

Then — neural networks, connectionism: information processing is parallel, distributed, without explicit rules. This changed the understanding of how intelligence works.

2011–2015: scandal in psychology. Attempts to reproduce 100 classic psychological studies — only 36% are successful. This is the “reproducibility crisis”: statistical manipulations (p-hacking), publication bias, small sample sizes.

Behavioral economics (Kahneman, Thaler) is also under scrutiny: the “priming effect” of Bargh was not reproduced. “Ego depletion” — is under doubt.

DeepMind AlphaFold2 (2021) predicted the structures of ~200 million proteins — practically the entire known proteome. A task on which molecular biologists spent years — is now solved in seconds. This is not just acceleration — it is a paradigm shift: AI predicts where traditional science describes.

Can this be called "understanding"? AlphaFold does not know why a protein folds in such a way. It predicts accurately. Is it a tool or a new type of scientific knowledge?

Traditional science: hypothesis → experiment → data. Big data science: data → patterns → hypotheses. This is an inversion of the scientific method. Correlative regularities without mechanistic explanation.

Criminology: the algorithm predicts recidivism — but does not explain why. Medicine: the algorithm diagnoses cancer from images more accurately than the radiologist — but does not explain what it looks at.

Climate change, vaccines, GMOs, Covid — these are areas where there is scientific consensus, yet a significant part of society does not accept it. This is not an education problem (“inform more — they’ll understand”). Research shows: more information about vaccines does not persuade anti-vaxxers....

Reasons for the crisis of trust: political polarization (science has become part of cultural wars); actual historical instances of scientific dishonesty; influence of corporate funding (tobacco, oil); algorithmic echo chambers.

Scientists are poorly trained in communication. Popularizing science is not “lowering” to the “level of the masses”, but creating narratives that resonate with the values of the audience.

Disciplines are historically established divisions of labor in science. In the nineteenth century, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, and sociology separated—this allowed for specialization and deeper study. In the twentieth century, problems arose that could not be solved within the framew...

Climatology is physics, chemistry, biology, economics, politics, and psychology together. Neuroscience is biology, physics, psychology, computer science, and philosophy. Complexity does not fit into disciplinary boxes.

Edward Wilson ("Consilience", 1998): the unity of knowledge is not reductionism (everything is reduced to physics), but mutual illumination of disciplines. Evolutionary biology sheds light on ethics, anthropology, and psychology. This is more productive than complete autonomy of disciplines.

The challenge for education: how to train specialists who know their field deeply and are able to speak the language of others?

The 8th–13th centuries—a period long ignored by European historians—was an era of scientific flourishing in the Islamic world. The Abbasid Caliphate, centered in Baghdad, created the “House of Wisdom” (Bayt al-Hikma), the largest intellectual center of the medieval world. Scholars were invited th...

This was not simply the copying of manuscripts—it involved critical assimilation and further development. Arab scholars did not merely copy the ancients—they commented on them, made corrections, supplemented them, and created original sciences. Without this period of the transmission of Greek sci...

Muhammad al-Khwarizmi (780–850)—the father of algebra. His “Al-Kitab al-Mukhtasar fi Hisab al-Jabr” (from which the word “algebra” originates) for the first time systematically described methods for solving quadratic equations. The word “algorithm” is a Latinization of his name. He also introduce...

Ibn Sina (980–1037)—“Avicenna” in European transcription. His “The Canon of Medicine” was the standard medical textbook of European universities up to the 17th century. Ibn Sina systematized ancient medical knowledge and added clinical observations. He was the first to describe the contagious nat...

The University of Bologna (founded around 1088) is the oldest in Western Europe. Paris, Oxford, Cambridge — 12th–13th centuries. These are not simply educational institutions — they are a new institutional form for the production and preservation of knowledge, created by the Middle Ages and still...

The university established “academic freedom” as a norm: the right of faculty and students to research and debate without direct interference from church or state. This is a fragile norm — constantly violated — but it created space for intellectual life.

The system of “master — student,” the disputation, the qualifying exam, and the degree — all these are inventions of the medieval university. Doctrine (doctrina) — literally “teaching, instruction”: knowledge that can be transmitted and defended.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) accomplished a grand synthesis. Aristotle had been rediscovered through Arabic translations — and created a crisis: his naturalism seemed incompatible with Christian revelation. Thomas showed: reason and faith do not contradict but complement each other.

Alchemy and astrology are perceived today as obvious pseudosciences. But this is an anachronism: in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance they were part of a legitimate intellectual project, shared by the foremost minds of their time. Newton studied alchemy seriously. Kepler drew up horoscopes—not ...

Alchemy had real cognitive achievements. The practice of distillation, evaporation, crystallization, acid-base reactions formed the basis of chemical knowledge. The work of Jabir ibn Hayyan (8th century) describes methods used by modern chemistry. Paracelsus (16th century) introduced the systemat...

Astrology was inseparable from astronomy right up until the 17th–18th centuries. Tycho Brahe carried out the most precise pre-astrologic observations of the planets to improve astrological predictions. Kepler discovered the laws of planetary motion—working as an astrologer at the imperial court. ...

Astrology presupposed systematic observation of celestial bodies, calibration of predictions, quantitative data. This is not “prejudice”—it is a theory with predictive claims, which was tested—and ultimately refuted (astrological predictions do not work beyond random guessing).

1905 was the “miraculous year” (annus mirabilis) for the young Einstein. In a single year he published four articles, each of which would have merited a Nobel Prize. Brownian motion (confirmation of the atomic theory). The photoelectric effect (light as quanta — the foundation of quantum mechanic...

The special theory of relativity destroyed Newtonian absolute simultaneity: time flows differently in different frames of reference. $E=mc^2$ is not just a formula, but the discovery that mass and energy are the same thing in different forms. The atomic bomb is an applied demonstration of this eq...

General theory of relativity (1915): gravity is not a force (Newton), but the curvature of space-time by massive bodies. Confirmed by the observation of the bending of light near the Sun during the eclipse of 1919. This was the first experimental verification — and a global sensation.

Quantum mechanics (Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Dirac, 1920s) describes the behavior of microparticles — and radically differs from classical mechanics. Particles do not have definite coordinates and momenta at the same time (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle). Before measurement, a particle i...

Einstein's letter to Roosevelt (1939): German scientists are working on a uranium chain reaction — it may be possible to create an "extremely powerful bomb." Thus began the Manhattan Project — a secret U.S. program to develop atomic weapons.

$2 billion, 130,000 people, three secret cities (Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford). The world's best physicists — Oppenheimer, Fermi, Bohr, Chadwick, Teller — worked under military command. July 16, 1945 — the first test in New Mexico. August 6 and 9 — Hiroshima and Nagasaki. 200,000 killed immedia...

After the explosions, many of the bomb's creators were shocked. Oppenheimer quoted the Bhagavad Gita: "I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." He became an active advocate for nuclear weapons control — and was stripped of access to classified information in 1954 as a "security threat."

Leo Szilard tried to prevent the use of the bomb: he organized a scientists' petition to Truman. It didn't help. Joseph Rotblat (the only scientist to leave the project on ethical grounds) and others created the Pugwash movement of scientists for peace — and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

Eugenics — the “science” of improving the human race through control of reproduction — is one of the darkest examples of how scientific authority is used to justify ideology.

Francis Galton (1822–1911), Darwin’s cousin, introduced the term and the program: if natural selection improves species, artificial selection is needed to improve humans. Encourage reproduction of the “best” (positive eugenics) and restrict the “worst” (negative eugenics).

The “science” of eugenics had academic status: university departments, journals, international conferences. In the United States, laws mandating forced sterilization of the “feebleminded” were adopted — and the Supreme Court confirmed their constitutionality in 1927. “Three generations of imbecil...

Nazi Germany took the eugenics program to the extreme: the “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” (1933) — forced sterilization of 400,000 people. “Action T4” — the murder of 70,000 mentally ill and physically disabled Germans. This directly preceded the Holocaust as a logica...

Alan Turing (1912–1954) is one of the few people who may be called the "father of the computer" in different senses. His main contributions: the mathematical foundations of computation, the practical creation of the first computers, the theory of artificial intelligence—and a tragic fate determin...

"Computable Numbers" (1936) is a fundamental work. Turing described the "Turing machine"—an abstract computational mechanism with a tape, head, and table of rules. This is not a physical object but a mathematical model of computation. The Church–Turing thesis: everything that can be computed at a...

Turing showed: there exist problems that a Turing machine cannot solve—the "halting problem" (it is impossible to write a program that determines whether another program will halt). This is a mathematical proof of the limits of computation.

The Second World War gave Turing a practical task: to break the "Enigma"—the German cipher machine. Turing created the "bombe"—an electromechanical machine for breaking codes—which enabled the Allies to read German military correspondence. By some estimates, this shortened the war by 2–4 years.

Norbert Wiener (“Cybernetics,” 1948) created the science of control and communication in animals and machines. The key idea: feedback is a universal mechanism of management. Thermostat, neuron, economy, society—all are governed through feedback: the system receives information about the outcome a...

This is a revolutionary generalization: one conceptual scheme describes control mechanisms in biology, technology, and social systems. Cybernetics became the precursor of systems thinking, information theory, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.

“Information” as a fundamental category: not matter and not energy, but a measure of the reduction of uncertainty. Claude Shannon (“A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” 1948) formalized the concept of information through the “bit” and entropy. This laid the foundation for coding theory, crypt...

Jay Forrester applied systems thinking to industrial management and cities. His student Dennis Meadows applied it to global ecology (“The Limits to Growth,” 1972, commissioned by the Club of Rome). The result: a computer model of the world system predicted collapse if growth trends persisted.

The internet grew out of a U.S. military project—ARPANET (1969)—which was created with the requirement of resilience to nuclear attack. Packet switching (instead of chained connections) allowed the network to operate even when nodes were damaged. The first message sent via ARPANET: “lo”—the compu...

Email appeared in 1971. TCP/IP (1983)—the protocol that became the language of the internet. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1991 as a tool for CERN physicists. The Mosaic browser (1993) made it accessible to everyone. The first online advertisement—a hyperlink—appeared in 199...

This is the history of the increasing commercialization of an originally academic network.

The internet is built on the “end-to-end” principle: intelligence resides at the ends (users’ computers), while the network remains a “dumb pipe”. This ensures neutrality—any application can run over the network.

The history of AI is a history of alternating periods of optimism and disappointment. The first wave of optimism (1950s–60s): McCarthy, Minsky, Simon promised to create thinking machines within 20 years. The “AI winter” of the 1970s: the complexity of the tasks was underestimated. The second wave...

The third optimism — the current one — is based on three factors: big data, computational power (GPU), deep learning. Neural networks, inspired by the brain and abandoned in the 1960s, were revived in the 2010s with astonishing results.

AlphaGo (2016) defeated the world champion in Go — a game considered unattainable for machines. GPT-3 (2020) generated text indistinguishable from human writing. GPT-4 (2023) passed medical, legal, MBA exams. This is a qualitative leap.

LLMs (Large Language Models) are neural networks trained on trillions of words of text to predict the next token. This is not “understanding” in a philosophical sense — it is statistical compression of an enormous corpus of human knowledge.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a genome editing system, discovered in nature as the immune mechanism of bacteria and adapted for use in 2012 by Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier (Nobel Prize 2020). The essence: "molecular scissors" that cut DNA at an exactly specified location.

Before CRISPR, genome editing was expensive, slow, and imprecise. CRISPR made it fast, cheap, and accessible—$50 instead of $50,000. This is the democratization of molecular biology with unpredictable consequences.

Applications: treatment of sickle cell anemia (approved by the FDA in 2023), possible treatment of hereditary diseases, research in oncology. "Designer babies"—germline editing, which is prohibited in most countries. He Jiankui (2018)—created the first genetically modified humans and ended up in ...

Synthetic biology is the design of living systems from scratch or the modification of existing ones to create new functions. Bacteria synthesizing insulin is already a reality (about 70% of the world's insulin is produced by transgenic bacteria). Yeast synthesizing opioids and antimalarial drugs.

The greenhouse effect was not discovered yesterday. Joseph Fourier in 1824 described how the atmosphere traps heat. John Tyndall in 1859 experimentally demonstrated that CO₂ absorbs infrared radiation. Svante Arrhenius in 1896 calculated: doubling CO₂ in the atmosphere would increase Earth's temp...

In the 1950s, Charles Keeling began systematically measuring CO₂ concentrations in Hawaii. The "Keeling Curve" — a continuous rise since 1958 — became a symbol of climate change. In 1988, climatologist James Hansen testified before Congress: global warming is already happening and is caused by hu...

Paradox: climate science is one of the most resilient scientific consensuses (97% of publications confirm the anthropogenic origin of warming, every scientific academy in the world). And at the same time — the object of unprecedented public denial.

A misinformation campaign by oil companies (documented through internal Exxon documents, published in 2015): the company knew about climate risks since the 1970s, financed internal research — and simultaneously financed an external campaign to sow doubt. The model — the tobacco industry.